Neil Fraser's 25-Year-Old .name Domain Is Being Killed by ICANN
.name Termination
Neil Fraser, a Google engineer, has hosted his website and email at neil.fraser.name for nearly 25 years. In 2026, Verisign proposed eliminating all third-level .name domains to simplify administration, and ICANN approved it. Fraser, one of 22,000 affected registrants, faces losing his domain, email, and IoT services, and fears domain hijacking if fraser.name becomes available. He criticizes Verisign's proposal as full of lies and is preparing legal action.
Once the 3rd-level domains are terminated, it is assumed that the now vacant 2nd-level domains will become available for registration.
- nneonneo
It seems like the right thing they should do is discontinue new registrations but continue to honour existing ones (+ continuing to reserve any 2LD that has a 3LD registered on top). It’s a bit insane that they can decide to just terminate all existing 3LD registrations. One would hope that they’d at least continue to reserve the 2LDs for some period to avoid domain squatting, but this isn’t mentioned in the proposal and I doubt Verisign would graciously do so.
- jl6
I can only assume somebody was asleep on the job when this scheme was approved, because the outcome is in direct contradiction to ICANN’s mission statement:
> Its enduring mission is to ensure the stable, secure operation of the Internet's unique identifier systems.
https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/about-icann
Arbitrary termination of service is not stability.
Enabling name hijacking is not security.
The answer cannot be a rival name scheme based on decentralization or crypto or whatever. Those are never going to help normal non-wizard users. The answer has to be to make the regulators do their job.
- nanolith
This risk factor is similar to one I brought up during architectural review of an IoT company I helped to build. It's why the identity certificates our devices used were entirely disconnected from domain names, and why the discovery protocol I put together did not rely on registered domains, but could use these as an untrusted part of discovery.
Domain names are leased. Things that are leased can disappear. The company leasing these assets could go bankrupt. They could weasel their way out of agreements as Verisign has done here. Any identity that is grounded in leased assets is built on shaky ground. It's also why I'm dubious of the way that e-mail addresses have become tied to online identity.
I'm not saying that what Verisign has done is right, but this behavior is expected. Those of us who went through the (dot) bomb era remember just how shaky this infrastructure can be.
I'm sorry that .name people are going through this. Even though it's a risk I expected, that doesn't make this okay.
- dvt
I freaked out for a second because I've owned `dvt.name` for like 15 years. `.name` is not getting terminated, so it's important to be precise here. The third-level x.y.name (where you're the `x`) is getting terminated, and the respective `y.name` domains are going to be released.
Still a crappy thing for people, but it does not affect owned second-level domains.
- akersten
It kind of seems like an insane TLD structure to begin with, right? I always thought .co.uk was bad (you're just pinning yourself to whoever owns the .co. part, but at least browsers have some suffix list where you can't, I don't know, hijack some login cookie for all of .co.).
Joe Smith and John Smith can independently register joe.smith.name and john.smith.name, do browsers have a wildcard suffix list for the 2nd level of `.name` specifically, or can Joe set a cookie on all of .smith.name?
- arjie
We were rescued from that dot org scam by the fact that ICANN is a California non profit. I wonder if the AG can lean on them again. This is an outrageous thing to do.
- aliasxneo
This is why I am building DNTLS. These organizations no longer deserve our trust and they have inadvertently gained too much power over the last two decades of massive internet expansion. Names need to be fully owned by individuals and a shared, decentralized trust system must be in place for resolution. The more I see actions like this, the more convinced I am that a solution is long overdue.
- sigbottle
There's a DNS wizard at my job (not doing DNS stuff currently; but in his past life), and while he was talking to me about certain topics my eyes glazed over, and I thought, "Man, surely that won't affect me, right?"
Well, it's still not affecting me, personally, but wow, seeing articles like this makes it feel just a tiny bit more real.
- econ
I don't like the way domains work in general. It's really quite expensive if you are wise enough to buy everything that looks to much like your website.
Did buy https://ycombinator.us
Didn't buy https://ycombinator.co.uk
What useful functionality is there in selling these domains?
Expiring domains is bad for the web and selling them to someone else is as terrible as the article makes it out to be.
- nubinetwork
> Once the 3rd-level domains are terminated, it is assumed that the now vacant 2nd-level domains will become available for registration. Should someone (other than me) scoop up fraser.name (...)
What's to stop someone from doing that, and keeping the status quo? Sure, it might be expensive, but pool together a few frasers for the initial buy, and make the money back on the sublets.